Art. I.—1. Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: with Notices of his Life. By Thomas Moore. In two volumes. London. Murray. 1831. pp 823.
2. The National Library. Conducted by the Rev. G. R. Gleig, and assisted by various eminent Writers, No. 1.—The Life of Lord Byron. By John Galt, Esq. London. Colburn and Bentley. 1831. 6s.
We do not know whether the public is one half so sick as we are of
the apparently interminable inquest which has been sitting upon the case of this noble
“Martyr of Genius,” (as Mr. Moore
is pleased to style him,) from the day of his decease unto the present hour. If we thought they
were, we should most certainly abstain from the slightest notice of memoir, biography, or
dissertation which might have for its object this extraordinary specimen of the human race. If
all that has been written about him were collected into one mass, we suspect that it would
present to us such a monument of restless idleness as the world has seldom seen. We doubt
whether the appearance of the wandering Jew would have caused such an epidemic eruption of
morbid curiosity. We know not where to look for an adequate illustration of it, but to the
pages of the veracious Hafen Slawkenbergius. The frenzy
spread among the good people of Strasburgh, by the stranger’s mysterious importation from
the promontory of Noses, is the only fit image of our universal fever of inquisitiveness. That
the disorder is not yet materially abated seems pretty evident from the volumes now before us,
more especially from the work of Mr. Galt. It really is a
very curious and instructive phenomenon. A “National
Library” is prepared for the edification of the people of England, under the conduct
of a minister of the national church: and the very first number of the miscellany is, what?—a
history of some eventful period, big with the
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With regard to Mr. Galt, however, it is but common justice to allow that his adorations are not, by any means, of so servile a cast as those of the multitude collected round the pedestal of this portentous image. He does not attempt to conceal from himself, or the public, that the fine gold may conceal a variety of much less precious materials. What the crowd of worshippers will say to this we know not. The fiery furnace is blazing before him; and, perhaps, he may not escape without a slight experience of its fierceness. It is not our business, however, to bind him and cast him in. If his prostrations are not sufficiently humble, we must turn him over to the tender mercies of his brother hierophants, whose faith and zeal appear to be of much more unquestionable purity. For ourselves, we have only to say that the service in which he is engaged does not appear to us very happily adapted to his powers. Among the writers of fiction, indeed, who are now actually swarming about the warm shallows of our modern literature, he holds a rank of no ordinary distinction. Of one of his achievements, in particular, he has ample reason to be proud. With an egotism entirely pardonable, he informs us, that Lord Byron “read his novel of the Entail three times, and thought the old Leddy Grippy one of the most living-like heroines he had ever met with.”* We cannot forbear to pause one moment to express our own full and cordial assent to this encomium. We do honestly think that it would scarcely be too much to pronounce this character to be among the most extraordinary creations in the whole range of modern fiction. Our judgment has been formed chiefly from the effect we ourselves experienced from its powers of entertainment. After once be-
* Page 268. |
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“There is no account of any great poet, whose genius was of that dreamy and cartilaginous kind, which hath its being in haze, and draws its nourishment from lights and shadows; which ponders over the mysteries of trees, and interprets the oracles of bubbling waters.”
A dreamy genius is not, perhaps, altogether beyond comprehension. But what in the name of all that is dreamy and fantastical is a cartilaginous kind of genius? Again:
“It”—(the ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’)—“was the first burst of that dark, diseased ichor, which afterwards coloured his effusions; the overflowing suppuration of that satiety and loathing, which rendered Child Harold, in particular, so original, incomprehensible, and anti-social.”
How could any writer think of patching up his composition with these vile rags from the hospital; these
ράκη βορέιας τον νοσηλέιας πλέα. |
“He was often strangely rapt—it may have been from his genius; and—had its grandeur and darkness been then divulged—susceptible of explanation; but, at the time, it threw, as it were, around him the sackcloth of penitence. Sitting amidst the shrouds and rattlings, in the tranquillity of moonlight, churming an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the albatross. He was as a mystery in a winding sheet, crowned with a halo!”
Now what on earth can be the meaning of all this? A moody, silent, and somewhat
unsociable young man is humming a tune to himself on the deck of a packet: whereupon his
companion invests him at once with the sackcloth of a penitent criminal.
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We must, however, do him the justice to declare, that there is nothing else in
the volume quite so bad as this. The work is, nevertheless, deformed, and rendered sometimes
insufferably tedious, by a perpetual affectation of saying all manner of fine, and deep, and
original things; by a resolution to speculate and analyze through thick and thin, until the
ultimate texture of the mind and character of the poet is laid bare to the inspection of the
reader. One would imagine that it were possible to trace the whole process of assimilation,
through which all the multifarious elements upon which it dieted, were converted into nutriment
by this mighty genius. His lordship himself once asked his friend Mr. Thomas Moore whether he did not find that feeding upon beef-steaks made him
ferocious? Much in the same spirit his biographer seems to question whether the “murk
and the mist, and the abysm of the storm, and the hiding places of guilt,” and a
vast many other articles of mental luxury, might not contribute to render his hero a prodigy of
all that is incomprehensible and anti-social. All that is gloomy or
terrible in nature, or in man, is supposed to have been mixed up as it were by a sort of
digestive energy, in the mental temperament and constitution of the bard. And the critic
appears to be, throughout, so much in the secret of the whole proceeding, that he is
continually interrupting his narrative in order to tell us how all this is; how it is that the
ingredients of sublimity and grandeur are imperceptibly absorbed into the intellectual system;
till we begin almost to fancy that we are on the very point of seeing the process by which a
genius may become “dreamy and cartilaginous,” or firm and vigorous, and full
of muscle and tendon. The end, however, usually is, that we carry away with us about as much
satisfaction and instruction as we should from an anatomical lecture which should attempt to
follow the fibres of the bullock’s rump
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But what shall we say to good Master Thomas
Moore—most Corinthian of Poets—most silvertongued of advocates and
apologists—most delicate and velvet-fingered manipulator of tender characters? In sober verity
we at first hardly knew how to trust ourselves within the sound of his syren cadences. We felt
that as if it would be needful for us to guard our credulous facility against the smoothness of
his cajoleries, especially whenever he appeared to be more than usually “graceful and
humane.” Happily, however, our vigilance and caution turns out to be much less
needful than we had anticipated. It is true that he has poured out, in vindication of his
friend, many a sentence of most sonorous melody, in ambitious imitation of a certain celebrated
orator, the founder of that noble art which “makes the worse appear the better
reason.” But then, with matchless effrontery, or infatuation, he has provided us,
in abundant measure, with the most infallible of all antidotes to this “delicious
poison.” The correspondence, and the journals, and the secret memoranda of the
hero, are perpetually confronting themselves with the pleadings of his apologist. The documents
of the advocate are eternally giving the lie to his sophistry. The features and attributes of
the client are constantly peeping forth, in most sinister contrast with the florid graces of
his devoted rhetorician. And what is the inevitable result of all this, but to render indelible
the very worst impressions which the public have ever received respecting this extraordinary
being? If time was beginning to spread its moss over the characters which speak of his infamy,
here is a sort of old (or middle-aged) Mortality, with his hammer and his chisel, to pick it
out, and deepen the letters, till they challenge every eye by their sharpness and freshness.
And who can rise from their perusal without a full persuasion that genius has rarely been seen
in more degrading combination with selfish and odious passions. It is to no purpose whatever
for Mr. M. to insinuate, that, in favour of high talent, darkness may, now
and then, be put for light, and light for darkness, without any very mischievous compromise of
the truth. Every one who hears him will instantly recollect the words wherewith Boswell was once smitten down by Samuel Johnson, when he endeavoured to palliate the infidelities of a married
woman;—“Never accustom yourself, Sir, to confound right and wrong; the
woman’s a whore, and there’s an end on’t.” Even so, (while our
liberal biographer is showing us that men of great intellectual powers are naturally haunted by
ungovernable passions, and that stupendous genius may be allowed to
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The founder of his family, Ralph de
Burun, came with the Conqueror into England; and
of this noble lineage the poet is said to have been prouder than of writing Childe Harold. His grandfather was the celebrated Admiral Byron. His grand uncle achieved notoriety by slaying his relative and neighbour, Mr. Chaworth, in a duel, or a brawl; and his father became equally notorious as one of the most selfish and
worthless prodigals in the annals of the polite world. He seduced the Marchioness of Caermarthen “under circumstances which have few
parallels in the licentiousness of fashionable life. The meanness with which he obliged his
wretched victim to supply him with money would have been disgraceful to the basest
adulteries of the cellar or the garret. A divorce ensued; the guilty pair were married; but
within two years after, such was the brutal and vicious conduct of Captain
Byron, that the ill-fated lady died literally of a broken heart, after
having given birth to two daughters,
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His mother was excessively fond of him, but nevertheless, it would seem, tormented him almost beyond endurance. Her passions were often absolutely incontrollable; and, in her paroxysms, she would sometimes taunt the unhappy boy with his deformity, thus adding venom to the sting of a misfortune which rankled bitterly in his mind till the end of his existence. At eight years old he was violently in love—so violently, that when he heard of the marriage of the young lady many years afterwards, the intelligence nearly choked him, to the horror of his mother, his own astonishment, and the incredulity of every one else. His other emotions were equally vehement; for Mr. Moore tells us that there exists at Aberdeen, to this day, a china saucer, out of which he actually had bitten a large piece, in a fit of rage, during his childhood.
In 1798 his granduncle died, upon which his mother removed with the young Lord to Newstead Abbey, which then presented an aspect of grievous desolation. After the fatal affray with Mr. Chaworth, the old peer had retired from the world, and fallen into a strangely eccentric, and unsocial course of life. During his latter years, his sole companions consisted of a colony of crickets, whose allegiance and fidelity he is said to have won so completely, that, at the death of their patron, the despairing rep-
* It is, however, the opinion of Mr.
Millengen, that the defect was congenital.—Memoirs on Greece, p. 143.
|
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It may as well be noticed here, once for all, that his unfortunate lameness was probably at the bottom of those waters of bitterness which were in after life perpetually overflowing in his character. The anguish and humiliation occasioned by this deformity were such as he never had magnanimity enough to overcome. In one of his own memoranda, he describes the horror and mortification which came over him, when his mother, in one of her fits of passion, called him a lame brat. The same agony was constantly breaking forth throughout the rest of his days. It may be said that he never forgave Nature or Providence this fatal injury. It was one main, though secret cause, which armed his hand against every man, and every man’s hand against him. He felt it as other people feel a wrong. It kept him, we are persuaded, in an almost perpetually vindictive frame of mind. It was the thorn in the flesh sent, like the messenger of Satan, to buffet him incessantly, and against which, unhappily, he was not provided with any defensive or antagonist principle. Other men, of no sluggish temperament, have been known to disregard their own personal blemishes, and even to convert them into occasions of merriment: and whenever this is the case, it is always considered as an indication of something amiable or noble in the character of the sufferer. It is hailed as a palpable victory over selfishness and egotism. But God help the man who is visited with any such defect or infirmity, if the necessity of perpetually shining in the eye of the public happens to enter into his scheme of happiness! Such a man is sure to be at the mercy of looks, and whispers, and shrugs, and monosyllables. He lives the life of a martyr without the spirit of a martyr; and the consequence must naturally be, that he will never be thoroughly at peace with himself or with mankind.
In 1799, Byron was sent to school at Dr.
Glennie’s, at Dulwich, his mother having removed to London for the benefit
of the best advice for his lameness. The schoolmaster often found the
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“Genius,” he tells us, “of every kind, belongs to some innate temperament, and is an ingredient of mind more easily described by its effects than its qualities. It is as the fragrance, independent of the freshness and complexion of the rose; as the light in the cloud; as the bloom on the cheek of beauty, of which the possessor is unconscious, until the charm has been seen by its influence on others; it is the internal golden flame of the opal; a something that may be abstracted from the thing in which it appears, without changing the quality of the substance, its form, or its affinities.”
It is to be presumed that the reader, by this time, has a very distinct and vivid conception of what is to be understood when we talk of genius. If not, he must be pronounced to be absolutely metaphor-proof: and in that case we can do nothing for him. If, however, the above figures have duly discharged their office, it can hardly be doubted that they will enable him easily to see his way to Mr. Galt’s obvious conclusion.
“I, therefore,”—(that is, because genius is like the fragrance of the rose, and the bloom of beauty, and the light on the cloud, and the flame of the opal)—“I, therefore, am not disposed to consider the idle and reckless childhood of Byron as unfavourable to the developement of his genius; but, on the contrary, inclined to think that the indulgence of his mother, leaving him so much to the accidents of undisciplined impression, was calculated to cherish associations, which rendered them, in the maturity of his powers, ingredients of the spell that ruled his memory.”
From all which, it clearly appears how thankful we ought to be that Lord Byron was a spoiled child, since otherwise, peradventure, he might have turned out a spoiled poet. With the profoundest gratitude, therefore, to the capricious fondness of his parent, we proceed with our tale.
At Harrow, according to his own account, Lord
Byron was unpopular, capricious, turbulent and rebellious; impatient of
continuous drudgery, but collecting large and various stores of information, by desultory
exertion; reading when no one else
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There is something at once ludicrous and frightful in the accounts preserved to
us of his own temper about this period, especially when brought into collision with that of his
lady mother. The explosions produced by the encounter of these hostile elements were
occasionally quite terrific. Each, it seems, was fully aware of the presence of the electric
principle in the other: and as a proof of this, it is told, that one evening, after a
tempestuous eruption of tremendous violence, each party went, privately, to the apothecary,
anxiously inquiring whether the other had been to purchase poison, and cautioning the vendor of
drugs on no account to attend to such an application, if made. On one occasion, the poker and
tongs became the winged messengers of the maternal wrath, and nothing but a precipitate retreat
could save the filial cranium from fracture. Of his residence at the university little is known
that is eminently worthy of remark. It is said that he kept a bear, as a sort of satirical
emblem of certain venerable personages
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But, however loose and desultory his intellectual habits may have been, he
appears at this time to have amassed a stock of information that would have been extraordinary
even for a youth of the most stubborn diligence. This may be learned from a list, scribbled
hastily into his memorandum book, of the various writers he had then perused, in various
departments of literature. The compass of his historical reading, more especially, is truly
sur-
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|
“Forget this world, my restless sprite,
Turn, turn thy thoughts to Heav’n:
There must thou soon direct thy flight,
If errors are forgiven.
To bigots and to sects unknown,
Bow down beneath th’ Almighty’s Throne;—
To him address thy trembling prayer;
He, who is merciful and just,
Will not reject a child of dust,
Although his meanest care.
Father of Light! to thee I call,
My soul is dark within;
Thou, who canst mark the sparrow fall,
Avert the death of sin.
Thou, who canst guide the wandering star,
Who calm’st the elemental war,
Whose mantle is yon boundless sky,
My thoughts, my words, my crimes forgive;
And, since I soon must cease to live,
Instruct me how to die.
1807.”
|
Both these are, assuredly, most remarkable performances. They exhibit that
strange unnatural phenomenon an infidel or sceptical boy. At that early age, as Mr. Moore very justly observes, the passions are, in general,
sufficiently disposed to usurp a latitude for themselves, without taking a license from
infidelity to enlarge their range. But with Lord Byron, he
adds, “the canker shewed itself in the morn and dew of youth,” when the
effect of such “blastments” is, for every “reason, most
fatal.” With regard to the spirit of “fervid adoration” displayed
in these addresses to the Deity, strangely mingled up with his “defiance of
creeds,” we apprehend it to be much the same thing with that, which is elsewhere
termed by Mr. Moore, the “poetry of
religion;” and which is well known to be a feeling entirely compa-
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“To have anticipated the worst experiments both of the voluptuary and the reasoner, to have reached, as he supposed, the boundary of this world’s pleasures, and see nothing but clouds and darkness beyond, was the doom—the anomalous doom—which a nature, premature in all its passions and powers, inflicted on Lord Byron.”—p. 184.
The state of his feelings with regard to the university and its studies, and of his opinions—if he can be said to have had opinions—respecting the national superstition, will be seen from the following letter:—
“Whenever leisure and inclination permit me the pleasure of a visit, I shall feel truly gratified in a personal acquaintance with one whose mind has been long known to me in his writings.
“You are so far correct in your conjecture, that I am a member of the University of Cambridge, where I shall take my degree of A. M. this term; but were reasoning, eloquence, or virtue, the objects of my search, Granta is not their metropolis, nor is the place of her situation an ‘El Dorado,’ far less an Utopia. The intellects of her children are as stagnant as her Cam, and their pursuits limited to the church—not of Christ, but of the nearest benefice.
“As to my reading, I believe I may aver, without
hyperbole, it has been tolerably extensive in the historical; so that few nations exist, or
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“I once thought myself a philosopher, and talked nonsense with great decorum: I defied pain, and preached up equanimity. For some time this did very well, for no one was in pain for me but my friends, and none lost their patience but my hearers. At last, a fall from my horse convinced me bodily suffering was an evil: and the worst of an argument overset my maxims and my temper at the same moment, so I quitted Zeno for Aristippus, and conceive that pleasure constitutes the το καλον. In morality, I prefer Confucius to the Ten Commandments, and Socrates to St. Paul, though the two latter agree in their opinion of marriage. In religion, I favour the Catholic emancipation, but do not acknowledge the Pope; and I have refused to take the Sacrament, because I do not think eating bread or drinking wine from the hand of an earthly vicar will make me an inheritor of heaven. I hold virtue in general, or the virtues severally, to be only in the disposition, each a feeling, not a principle. I believe truth the prime attribute of the Deity; and death an eternal sleep, at least of the body. You have here a brief compendium of the sentiments of the wicked George Lord Byron; and, till I get a new suit, you will perceive I am badly clothed. I remain,” &c.,—vol. i. pp. 134, 135.
This precious epistle is illustrated by a sage and ample commentary of the
biographer. Its odious flippancy upon sacred subjects, Mr.
Moore is half disposed to palliate as a little sally of sportiveness, prompted
by a design to astonish and mystify his prosy correspondent and adviser, Mr. Dallas. He addresses himself with more solemnity, to the
task of vindicating the language of scorn and aversion with which it assails the university;
and he seems to find great comfort and contentment in the recollection that this feeling of
distaste for his “nursing mother” was entertained by his Lordship, in common
with some of the most illustrious names of English literature. Milton hated not only Cambridge, but the very fields in its neighbourhood.
Gray describes it as a place full of doleful
creatures. The bigotry of Oxford was visited with the cool contempt of Locke: and Gibbon spat
forth upon her the blistering venom of his malignity.
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Now how it is that Mr. Moore, could thus give himself over to work all manner of imbecility with greediness, and to talk like a crude, ignorant, and shallow boy, utterly transcends empowers of comprehension! Certain highly-gifted individuals, it seems, have been known to vent some splenetic and hasty sentences against their Alma Mater; and these “follies of the wise” are to sanctify the petulance of all-talented young gentlemen, and to arm them with a license to rail against discipline to the end of time! Again, to estimate highly the influence of the Universities over the national mind, is nothing better than a vulgar error; for, is it not undeniable that there are at least half a dozen great poets who never were at any University at all? Is it possible that the writer could be blind to the ignominious stolidity of all this pitiable drivelling? Has he yet to learn that Universities would still be exceedingly useful and valuable, even if it could be shown that they are not the best of all seminaries for the formation of poets; and that factious, moody, and self-willed young men may be intolerable nuisances, even though Milton and Locke may have despised authority, and spoken evil of dignities?
But we must hasten to the period which brought Byron before the public, and
placed him eventually among the most splendid names of English literature. In 1808 came forth
the “Hours of Idleness, by a Minor.”
The merciless and wanton chastisement of the
Northern Inquisitors soon followed; and, assuredly, the soundest horsewhipping could not have
roused the youthful patrician to more deep and deadly resentment. “A friend, who found
him in the first moments of excitement, inquired anxiously if he had received a
challenge—not knowing how else to account for the fierce defiance of his looks.”
The agony of the moment demanded immediate relief. The wrathful minor
accordingly called for claret, and swallowed three bottles to his own share! This, however, was
only a transient mitigation of the anguish. Nothing could effectually assuage it but deeds of
vengeance. He
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“The greater part of this satire I most sincerely wish had never been written; not only on account of the injustice of much of the critical and some of the personal part, but the tone and temper are such as I cannot approve.
His satire, smart and successful as it was, afforded but slender promise of the
wonders that followed it. The secret of hie own strength was at that time probably unrevealed
even to himself. It was amid influence of foreign scenery and manners that he first began to
explore the depths of his genius. Mr. M. does not suffer
him to depart on his wanderings without some fifteen pages of exceedingly diffuse and whimsical
meditation. He gives us much grave speculation on the disappointed loves of the schoolboy—(a
disaster probably experienced by some nine schoolboys out of ten)—and much profound research
respecting the revolution which was now taking place in the character of his hero. All this is
treated with nearly as much solemn prolixity as if the progress of a national revolution, or
the vicissitudes of a great empire, were the subject of investigation. The case of Lord Byron (if we are to trust his biographer) is precisely
exhibited by Shakspeare’s fancy, of
“sweet bells jangled out of tune.” His early disadvantages and
mortifications had turned the original harmonies of his character into discord; his very
virtues and excellencies ministered to the violence of the change. The ardour that burned
through his friendships and loves, now fed the fierce explosions of his indignation and scorn;
and—and—a great deal more to the same purpose. In all this we are able to discern little but
the workings of intense egotism and undisciplined passion; and we suspect that many others will
be tempted to the same view of the matter when they see the result of all this furious
fermentation, exhibited to us as it is by Mr. Moore himself, when he tells
us, that the “martyr of genius” was hurried at last, “by his hatred of hypocrisy, and his horror of all pretensions to
virtue, into the still more dangerous boast and ostentation of vice.” It
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“Thou, Nature, art their Goddess! to thy law Their services are bound: wherefore should they Stand in the plague of custom?” |
It is needless to dwell on the peregrination of the bard. The pilgrimage of Childe Harold is known to all the world. It gives Mr. Moore, however, another opportunity for some very fine writing, of which the following is a specimen:
“Having traversed Acarnania, the travellers passed to the Ætolian side of the Achelous, and on the 21st of November reached Missolonghi. And here,—it is impossible not to pause, and send a mournful thought forward to the visit which, fifteen years after, he paid to this same spot,—when, in the full meridian both of his age and fame, he came to lay down his life as the champion of that land, through which he now wandered a stripling and a stranger. Could some Spirit have here revealed to him the events of that interval,—have shown him, on the one side, the triumphs that awaited him, the power his varied genius would acquire over all hearts, alike to elevate or depress, to darken or illuminate them,—and then place, on the other side, all the penalties of this gift, the waste and wear of the heart through the imagination, the havoc of that perpetual fire within, which, while it dazzles others, consumes the possessor,—the invidiousness of such an elevation in the eyes of mankind, and the revenge they take on him who compels them to look up to it,—would he, it may be asked, have welcomed glory on such conditions? would he not rather have felt that the purchase was too costly, and that such warfare with an ungrateful world, while living, would be ill recompensed even by the immortality it might award him afterwards.”—vol. i. pp. 211, 212.
We confess that there is a good deal more in all this than has ever been dreamed
of in our narrow and antiquated philosophy. For instance, we doubt whether we correctly
apprehend what can be meant by “the waste and wear of the heart through the ima-
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“These abilities,” says Milton, “are the inspired gift of God, rarely
bestowed; and are of power to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and
public civility—to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in a right
tune—to celebrate, in glorious and lofty hymns, the throne and equipage of God’s
Almightiness, and what he works, and what he suffers to be wrought, with high providence,
in his Church—to sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and triumphs of
just and pious nations doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ—to
deplore the general relapses of kingdoms and states from justice and God’s true
worship. Lastly, whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime—in virtue amiable or grave—
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Such are the oracles which came forth from the sanctuary of the heart of Milton. Is it possible that the age in which we live can be so villainously degenerate as to listen, with these words of sanctity ringing in their ears, to the periods of an effeminate and fantastic sophistry!
But the most prodigiously impudent and absurd sentence, in the paragraph above cited from Mr. Moore, is that in which he speaks of the warfare of the poet with an ungrateful world! We should be glad to learn what Lord Byron did for the world, for which he did not receive from the world the most ample and generous retribution? The world heaped admiration and renown upon him in full and prodigal measure; and if gold had been his object, the liberality of the world was sufficient to have raised him from indigence to affluence. It is true that when he wantonly spurned at all that the best and wisest of mankind hold sacred, the voice of loud reprobation was lifted up against him; and the cry which deepened at his heels may have raised within him a spirit of proud and almost ferocious defiance. But though he was, at last, villainously out of humour with the world, and in fiery wrath against his own country more especially, nothing (we are persuaded) ever entered his head so immensely ridiculous as to charge the world with ingratitude. This strain of “poor, unmanly, melancholy” whining, was reserved for his biographer; and if the defunct bard were to chastise the indiscretion of his friend, by haunting him a little, as he is said to have threatened to haunt his valet, old Fletcher, it would be a very proper punishment for coupling his name with so much wretched imbecility.
Lord Byron, having solemnly abandoned the vocation of authorship, and having repeatedly expressed his utter contempt for a life of scribbling, as compared with a life of action, returned to England in an agony of impatience—to print! The success of his lampoon had persuaded him that satire was his forte; and he
* Milton
on Church Government, book ii. |
| 276 | Life of Lord Byron. |
——“as a planetary plague, when Jove
Will o’er some high-viced city hang his poison In the sick air.” |
The appearance of Childe Harold instantly threw open to him all the saloons of fashionable voluptuousness, and all the haunts of political liberalism. The brilliant world of dandyism and licentiousness was disclosed before him. He entered, of course, “nothing loath:” and, for a time,
———“he followed The sugared game before him;” |
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We pause here a moment to notice an event to which Mr. Moore attaches great importance, if we are to judge by the unmerciful length at which he has been pleased to relate it. “Can none remember?—yes, we know all must,”—the tremendous critico-martial encounter at Chalk Farm, hitched into rhyme by the provoking pleasantry of the Noble Satirist. Relative to this matter, some correspondence, of rather a polemical cast, ensued; and the whole of it is here printed, for the purpose of honouring the good sense, self-possession, and manly frankness of Lord Byron. We do not profess to be judges of such affairs: but, in our simple apprehension, the matter might have been settled in two words. Instead of this, a circuitous and wary correspondence takes place, conducted according to the most approved forms of the world’s conventional diplomacy. Fortunately, the event was bloodless. The heroes approached, each through an admirable series of parallels. “Their hearts were mighty, their skins were whole, and burnt sack,”—or, at least, abundance of good companionship,—“was the issue.” The high contracting parties exchanged assurances of their most distinguished consideration. From that time Lord Byron and Tom Moore were sworn brothers; and an
* Vol. ii. p. 470. |
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In one of Lord Byron’s letters to another correspondent, this year, we have a magnificent specimen of his qualifications for judging on questions connected with religion or the Scriptures.
“I have gotten,” he says, “a book by Sir W. Drummond, entitled Œdipus Judaicus, in which he endeavours to prove the greater part of the Old Testament an allegory, particularly Genesis and Joshua. He professes himself a theist, and handles the literal interpretation very roughly. I wish you could see it. Mr. W. has lent it to me; and I confess, to me, it is worth fifty Watsons!”
Of course, it was worth fifty Watsons to him, or to any man who, like him, loved darkness better than light. It was better, not only than fifty Watsons, but better than the whole army of mighty intellects who have done valiantly in behalf of the Truth; better than the Halls, and the Taylors, and the Barrows, and the Bacons, and the whole host of them put together. The performance of Sir Wm. Drummond, it is well known, was scarcely outdone in extravagance by the wildest absurdities of the Rabbinical writers; and it soon fell into contempt and oblivion. But it was a laudable effort to establish freedom of thought, and therefore it threw into the shade the prodigies of erudition, and of eloquence, and of reasoning, which had been lavished for ages in the cause of superstition! This incredible sally of impudence and folly, be it remembered, is addressed to a gentleman designed for holy orders; and it finds a place in a publication put forth by an intimate of the Noble Genius, with the express purpose of disabusing the public mind of its prepossessions to his disadvantage. All this irresistibly reminds us of the text, “Let the dead bury their dead;” and not only bury them, but pronounce their funeral oration, and embalm their memory, and hand down their excellence to the imitation of a grateful posterity; yea, let them do this, after that very fashion, of which a noble specimen is to be found some pages onward.
“The world,” says the biographer, “had yet to witness what he was capable of when emancipated from this restraint”—(the prejudices of society). “For graceful and powerful as were his flights, while society had still a hold of him, it was not till let loose from the leash that he rose into the true region of his strength”—(the region peopled with Cain, Don Juan, &c.); “and though, almost in proportion to that strength was, too frequently, the abuse of it, yet so magnificent are the very excesses of such energy, that it is impossible, even while we condemn, not to admire.”—vol. i. p. 351.
| Life of Lord Byron. | 279 |
———“e’en let the Devil Be, some time, honoured for his burning throne.” |
For the controul imposed upon him by the “meddling world” during his confinement within its rules, he partially and imperfectly indemnified himself by pouring out the secrets of his spirit in his Journal, which was to him as a confidential and familiar friend, and afforded him vast relief when his soul was labouring with the magnanimities of impiety. And this is the fashion in which, as appears from his log-book, (as he terms it,) he communeth with his own heart:
“All are inclined to believe what they covet, from a lottery-ticket up to a passport to Paradise,—in which, from description, I see nothing very tempting. My restlessness tells me I have something within that ‘passeth show.’ It is for Him, who made it, to prolong that spark of celestial fire which illuminates, yet burns, this frail tenement; but I see no such horror in a ‘dreamless sleep,’ and I have no conception of any existence which duration would not render tiresome. How else ‘fell the angels,’ even according to your creed? They were immortal, heavenly, and happy as their apostate Abdiel is now by his treachery. Time must decide; and eternity won’t be the less agreeable or more horrible because one did not expect it. In the meantime, I am grateful for some good, and tolerably patient under certain evils—grace à Dieu et mon bon tempérament.”—vol. i. p. 455.
Again—
“To-day responded to La Baronne de Staël Holstein, and sent to Leigh Hunt (an acquisition to my acquaintance—through Moore—of last summer) a copy of the two Turkish Tales. Hunt is an extraordinary character, and not exactly of the present age. He reminds me more of the Pym and Hampden times—much talent, great independence of spirit, and an austere, yet not repulsive, aspect. If he goes on qualis ab incepto, I know few men who will deserve more praise or obtain it. I must go and see him again;—the rapid succession of adventure since last summer, added to some serious uneasiness and business, have interrupted our acquaintance; but he is a man worth knowing; and though, for his own sake, I wish him out of prison, I like to study character in such situations. He has been unshaken, and will continue so. I don’t think him deeply versed in life;—he is the bigot of virtue (not religion), and enamoured of the beauty of that ‘empty name,’ as the last breath of Brutus pronounced, and every day proves it. He is, perhaps, a little opiniated, as all men who are the centre of circles, wide or narrow—the Sir Oracles, in whose name two or three are gathered together—must be, and as even Johnson was; but, withal, a valuable man, and less vain than success and even the consciousness of preferring ‘the right to the expedient’ might excuse.”—ibid. p. 58.
The exquisitely ludicrous comparison of Leigh
Hunt to the
| 280 | Life of Lord Byron. |
Let us take another specimen of these comfortable and high-minded soliloquies:
“I wonder how the deuce any body could make such a world; for what purpose dandies, for instance, were ordained—and kings—and fellows of colleges—and women of ‘a certain age’—and many men of any age—and myself, most of all!
‘Divesne prisco et natus ab Inacho,
Nil interest, an pauper, et infima De gente, sub dio moreris, Victima nil miserantis Orci. * * * *
Omnes eodem cogimur.’ |
“Is there any thing beyond?—who knows? He that can’t tell. Who tells that there is? He who don’t know. And when shall he know? Perhaps, when he don’t expect, and generally, when he don’t wish it. In this last respect, however, all are not alike: it depends a good deal upon education,—something upon nerves and habits—but most upon digestion.”—vol. i. p. 500.
Much in the same spirit of almost fiendish mockery is a good deal of his communing with his friend and biographer, whom he appears to have used quite as unceremoniously and confidentially as he did his Journal: for instance—
“I have also, more or less, been breaking a few of the favourite commandments; but I mean to pull up and marry,—if any one will have me. In the mean time, the other day, I nearly killed myself with a collar of brawn, which I swallowed for supper, and indigested for I don’t know how long. All this gourmandise was in honour of Lent; for I am forbidden meat all the rest of the year,—but it is strictly enjoined me during your solemn fast.”—vol. i. p. 540.
“My great comfort is, that the temporary celebrity I have wrung from the world has been in the very teeth of all opinions and prejudices. I have flattered no ruling powers; I have never concealed a single thought that tempted me. They can’t say I have truckled to the times, nor to popular topics (as Johnson, or somebody, said of Cleveland), and whatever I have gained has been at the expenditure of as much personal favour as possible; for I do believe never was a bard more unpopular, quoad homo, than myself. And now I have done;—‘ludite nunc alios.’ Every body may be d——d, as they seem fond of it, and resolved to stick lustily for endless brimstone.”—vol. i. p. 541.
Here again be “excesses of energy which it is impossible,even while we condemn, not to admire!!!”
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The log-book, however, has occasionally better things than these. For example, we find there the following very just censura of Lewis’s Monk.
“Redde”—(the poet was sometimes ambitious of spelling better than his neighbours)—“Redde a good deal, but desultorily. My head is crammed with the most useless lumber. It is odd that when I do read, I can only bear the chicken broth of—any thing but Novels. It is many a year since I looked into one (though they are sometimes ordered, by way of experiment, but never taken) till I looked yesterday at the worst parts of the Monk. These descriptions ought to have been written by Tiberius at Caprea—they are forced—the philtred ideas of a jaded voluptuary. It is to me inconceivable how they could have been composed by a man only twenty—his age when he wrote them. They have no nature—all the sour cream of cantharides. I should have suspected Buffon of writing them on the deathbed of his detestable dotage. I had never redde this edition, and merely looked at them from curiosity and recollection of the noise they made, and the name they have left to Lewis. But they could do no harm, except * * *
Here, we suppose, there follows something in the MS. quite unfit to be redde or uttered. It may be remarked here that these mysterious lacuna are of very frequent occurrence, both in the extracts from the log-book and the correspondence. They are often found where the writer seems advancing towards the regions of blasphemy or obscenity; and, in such cases, our conductor generally brings us just to the “fauces graveolentis Averni,” but, very wisely and humanely, does not suffer us to step into the pestilential gulf.
The following passage is worth citing, as recording a curious fact, and containing a just observation.
“Allen (Lord Holland’s Allen—the best-informed and one of the ablest men I know—a perfect Magliabecchi—a devourer, a Helluo of books, and an observer of men) has lent me a quantity of Burns’s unpublished, and never-to-be published, Letters. They are full of oaths and obscene songs. What an antithetical mind!—tenderness, roughness—delicacy, coarseness—sentiment, sensuality—soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity—all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!
“It seems strange; a true voluptuary will never abandon his mind to the grossness of reality. It is by exalting the earthly, the material, the physique of our pleasures, by veiling these ideas, by forgetting them altogether, or, at least, never naming them hardly to one’s self, that we alone can prevent them from disgusting.”—vol. i. p. 469.
This remark shows how deeply, even at that early age, Byron had studied the philosophy of vice. The above
fragment contains the best explanation that, perhaps, can be given of the anomalous and
monstrous union which sometimes we see exemplified of gross sensuality with the highest powers
of intellect. It is
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|
“The fact notorious, nor obscure the cause,
We wear the chains of Pleasure and of Pride.
These share the man, and these distract him too.
Pride, like an eagle, builds among the stars;
But Pleasure, lark-like, nests upon the ground.
Joys shared by brute-creation, Pride resents,
Pleasure embraces. Man would both enjoy,
And both at once: a point how hard to gain!
But what can’t Wit, when stung by strong desire?
Wit dares attempt this arduous enterprise.
* * * *
Wit calls the Graces the chast zone to loose,
Nor less than a plump god to fill the bowl.
* * * *
Pleasure and Pride, by nature mortal foes,
At war eternal, which in man shall reign,
By Wit’s address patch up a fatal peace,
And hand in hand, lead on the rank debauch,
From rank, refined to delicate and gay.
Art, cursed Art wipes off the indebted blush
From Nature’s cheek, and bronzes every shame.
Man smiles in ruin, glories in his guilt,
And Infamy stands candidate for praise!”—Night v.
|
One more dip into the log-book!
“Last night I supped with Lewis; and, as usual, though I neither exceeded in solids or fluids, have been half dead ever since. My stomach is entirely destroyed by long abstinence; and the rest will probably follow. Let it: I only wish the pain over. The ‘leap in the dark’ is the least to be dreaded.”—p. 460.
Such are the feelings with which a being—gifted with powers which must have
continually spoken to him of immortality—could stand upon “this bank and shoal of
time,” and look upon the stupendous ocean of eternity that surrounds it! And
then—think of the self-denial which this scorner of human virtue could exercise, in order to
avoid the horrors of obesity. He could entirely destroy his stomach by
abstinence rather than endure the slightest loss of personal activity and grace. And
yet he had always a sardonic sneer in readiness to wither the hypocrisy
which could cant and prose about counting all things as loss compared with that hope which is
the only anchor of the soul! Of a truth, the martyrs of incredulity are but a feeble and
unsteady folk when brought to the stake of common sense. And fitly, indeed, are they rewarded,
even here, for the base fidelity they show to their
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“Finding Lord Byron,” says Mr. Moore, “invariably lively when we were together, I often rallied him on the gloomy tone of his poetry, as assumed; but his constant answer was—(and I soon ceased to doubt of its truth)—that, though thus merry and full of laughter with those he liked, he was at heart, one of the most melancholy wretches living.”—vol. i. p. 356.
The truth is, that he knew nothing of what Jeremy Taylor calls the “perpetual festivities” of a heart at peace with itself. Hence the volcanic fires within, and the superficial bloom and verdure without. This contrast was afterwards very clearly discerned by one who was most interested in observing it, as will appear from a fragment of his own:
“People have wondered at the melancholy which runs through my writings. Others have wondered at my personal gaiety. But I recollect once, after an hour in which I had been sincerely and particularly gay, and rather brilliant in company, my wife replying to me when I said (upon her remarking my high spirits), ‘And yet, Bell, I have been called and mis-called melancholy—you must have seen how falsely, frequently?’—‘No, Byron,’ she answered, ‘it is not so: at heart you are the most melancholy of mankind; and often when apparently gayest.’“—Moore, vol. i. p. 649.
This is the blessedness of him who has, on one hand, a genius that can work miracles at his capricious bidding, and, on the other hand, passions that laugh at all restraints, divine and human! These are the wages of the adventurer who takes service with those noted and inseparable brethren, Sans-loy, Sans-foy, and Sans-joy!
It was thought by several of Lord
Byron’s friends that matrimony afforded him the only chance of deliverance
from this vile society. He seems to have thought so himself; for he says, somewhere in his
log-book—“a wife would be the salvation of me.” It was hoped, at least,
that marriage might do for him what a legitimate despotism sometimes does for a nation harassed
and torn to pieces by a rapid succession of revolutionary tyrannies. That he thought the
experiment, at all events, worth trying, is evident from the fact, that he had once already
offered his neck to the yoke of wedlock. He had, actually, been a suitor to Miss Milbanke, the present Lady Byron. But
his hour was not yet come. The lady, with every imaginable assurance of friendship and regard,
had declined the proposal. She had, however, accompanied her refusal with the expression of a
wish that their correspondence should be continued—alas! periculosæ
plenum
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“A person, who had for some time stood high in his affection and confidence, observing how cheerless and unsettled was the state both of his mind and prospects, advised him strenuously to marry; and, after much discussion, he consented. The next point for consideration was—who was to be the object of his choice: and while his friend mentioned one lady, he himself named Miss Milbanke. To this, however, his adviser strongly objected,—remarking to him, that Miss Milbanke had at present no fortune, and that his embarrassed affairs would not allow him to marry without one; that she was moreover a learned lady, which would not at all suit him. In consequence of these representations, he agreed that his friend should write a proposal for him to the other lady named, which was accordingly done; and an answer, containing a refusal, arrived as they were, one morning, sitting together. ‘You see,’ said Lord Byron, ‘that, after all, Miss Milbanke is to be the person;—I will write to her.’ He accordingly wrote on the moment, and as soon as he had finished, his friend, remonstrating still strongly against his choice, took up the letter,—but on reading it over, observed, ‘Well, really, this is a very pretty letter;—it is a pity it should not go. I never read a prettier one.’ ‘Then it shall go,’ said Lord Byron, and in so saying, sealed and sent off, on the instant, this fiat of his fate.”—Moore, pp. 580, 581.
Now is not this, we would ask, a right merry-conceited and most delectable
scene? What might not be made of it, in the hands of an artist of any dramatic powers? A young
gentleman wants to be married. His guide, philosopher, and friend, for the time being,
violently remonstrates against his choice, because the lady has plenty of learning in
possession, but fortune only in expectancy. The lover, however, sits down and writes; his sage
and faithful counsellor, retaining all his objections to the person addressed, nevertheless
gives his sanction and approbation to the dispatch; and Miss
Milbanke is invited to become Lady Byron because—it is a
pity that a pretty letter should not go!—Could the genius of urbane
comedy have suggested a happier incident? How shall the laughter-loving portion of the most
discerning public in the world express their obligations to the candour and impartiality which
has furnished them with it;—and this, too, in magnanimous disregard of certain tragic
reminiscences which the
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“On the day of the arrival of the lady’s answer, he was sitting at dinner, when his gardener came in and presented him with his mother’s wedding ring, which she had lost many years before, and which the gardener had just found in digging up the mould under her window. Almost at the same moment, the letter from Miss Milbanke arrived, and Lord Byron exclaimed, ‘If it contains a consent, I will be married with this very ring.’ It did contain a very flattering acceptance of his proposal, and a duplicate of the letter had been sent to London, in case this should have missed him.”—Memoranda, Moore, vol. i. p. 582, note.
The following is one of the various letters in which he announces his success. It would be amusing and laughable enough, if one could but dismiss all recollection of the sequel.
“Your recollection and invitation do me great honour; but I am going to be ‘married, and can’t come.’ My intended is two hundred miles off, and the moment my business here is arranged, I must set out in a great hurry to be happy. Miss Milbanke is the good-natured person who has undertaken me, and, of course, I am very much in love, and as silly as all single gentlemen must be in that sentimental situation. I have been accepted these three weeks; but when the event will take place, I don’t exactly know. It depends partly upon lawyers, who are never in a hurry. One can be sure of nothing; but, at present, there appears no other interruption to this intention, which seems as mutual as possible, and now no secret, though I did not tell first,—and all our relatives are congratulating away to right and left in the most fatiguing manner.
“You perhaps know the lady. She is niece to Lady Melbourne, and cousin to Lady
Cowper and others of your acquaintance, and has no fault, except being a
great deal too good for me, and that I must pardon, if nobody else should. It might have
been two years ago, and, if it had, would have saved me a world of trouble. She has
employed the interval in refusing about half a dozen of my particular friends, (as she did
me once, by the way,) and has taken me at last, for which I am very much obliged to her. I
wish it was well over, for I do hate bustle, and
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“Pray forgive me for scribbling all this nonsense. You know I must be serious all the rest of my life, and this is a parting piece of buffoonery, which I write with tears in my eyes, expecting to be agitated. Believe me most seriously and sincerely your obliged servant,
“P.S. My best rems. to Lord * * on his return.”—Moore, vol. i. pp. 583, 584.
Byron was now a doomed man: and his friend and
biographer,—who had long entertained such sanguine hopes of the transforming efficacy of
wedlock,—began to look forward with dismay to the consequences of the irrevocable step, very
soon after the poet had resolved upon it. He was assailed, he tells us, with certain doubts and
misgivings as to the fitness of the gifted man for the matrimonial tie, under any circumstances
whatever; and, was “filled with a foreboding anxiety as to his fate, which the
unfortunate events that followed but too fully justified.” And the discovery of
Childe Harold’s disqualification for
“the calm affections and comforts which form the cement of domestic
life” seems to have led to a still wider range of speculation; the result of which
is, that “men of the higher order of genius” have, in all ages and in all
countries, been found to labour under a similar sort of inaptitude. The most illustrious sages,
we are reminded, have all lived single lives; married poets have seldom been happy in their
homes; and, to the most conspicuous instances of this infelicity—Dante, Milton, Shakspeare, and Dryden,
“we have now to add, as a partner in their destiny, a name worthy of being placed
beside the greatest of them—Lord Byron.” What may be the
authority for numbering Shakspeare among the victims of matrimony, we are
unable to divine. But however that may be, Shakspeare and his mighty
brethren together, supply Mr. Moore with materials for
no less than eight quarto pages of most mellifluous and solemn disquisition; the moral of all
which is, that intellectual mediocrity is one of the indispensable ingredients of conjugal
bliss! Surely, it is a pity that these profound meditations did not occur to him, for the
benefit of his noble friend, before he joined in urging him to a matrimonial adventure, and in
representing such a measure as affording the best hope of reclaiming him from those
eccentricities which are incident to the planetary path of every distinguished genius! As it
is, the speculations of the biographer are not a little curious. At first, he is persuaded that
domestic peace is the pole star which is to regulate the course of this mighty intellect. But
no sooner does he find that this hope is treacherous,
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With these illustrious authorities for the domestic infelicity of genius, we are duly fortified and prepared for the issue of the adventure in question.
“Accordingly, at the end of December, accompanied by his friend, Mr. Hobhouse, he (Lord Byron) set out for Seaham, the seat of Sir Ralph Milbank, the lady’s father, in the county of Durham, and on the 2d of January, 1815, was married.”
The poetical history of this event is as follows:—
|
———“I saw him stand
Before an altar with a gentle bride;
Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The Starlight of his Boyhood;—as he stood
Even at the altar, o’er his brow there came
The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock
That in the antique Oratory shook
His bosom in its solitude; and then—
As in that hour—a moment o’er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced,—and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reel’d around him; he could see
Not that which was, nor that which should have been—
But the old mansion and the accustom’d hall,
And the remember’d chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour,
And her, who was his destiny, came back,
And thrust themselves between him and the light:—
What business had they there at such a time)”*
Moore, vol. i. p. 599.
|
The above visionary representation of the matter is here “introduced historically,” as closely agreeing with the prose account of the same affair in the Memoranda of the bridegroom, in which he describes himself
“as waking, on the morning of his marriage, with the most melancholy reflections, on seeing his wedding-suit spread out before him. In the same mood he wandered about the grounds alone, till he was summoned for the ceremony, and joined, for the first time on that day, his bride and her family. He knelt down—he repeated the words after the clergyman; but a mist was before his eyes—his thoughts were elsewhere; and
* The
Dream. |
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About a month after this most joyous enterprize, we find him writing thus from Seaham.
“Since I wrote last I have been transferred to my father-in-law’s, with my lady, and my lady’s maid, &c. &c.; and the treacle-moon is over, and I am awake, and find myself married. My spouse and I agree to—and in—admiration. Swift says, ‘no wise man ever married;’ but, for a fool, I think it the most ambrosial of all possible future states.
“I wish you would respond, for I am here obitusque meorum, obliviscendus et illis. Pray tell me what is going on in the way of intriguery, and how the w——s and rogues of the upper Beggar’s Opera go on—or rather go off—in or after marriage; or who are going to break any particular commandment. Upon this dreary coast we have nothing but county meetings and shipwrecks; and I have this day dined upon fish, which, probably, dined upon the crews of several colliers lost in the late gales. But I saw the sea once more in all the glories of surf and foam—almost equal to the Bay of Biscay, and the interesting white squalls and short seas of Archipelago memory.
“My papa, Sir Ralpho, hath recently made a speech at a Durham tax-meeting; and not only at Durham, but here, several times since, after dinner. He is now, I believe, speaking it to himself (I left him in the middle) over various decanters, which can neither interrupt him, nor fall asleep, as might probably have been the case with some of his audience.”—“I must go to tea: d— tea! I wish it was Kinnaird’s brandy, and with you to lecture me about it.”
Now here we must pause, for one moment, to contemplate the glorious liberty
wherewith the sons of genius are made free from the yoke which hangs about the neck of
quotidian and prosaic respectability! Of the dissolute levity of this epistle we say nothing;
but here is a man, received with confidence and hospitality by the father of the woman whose
feelings he is bound by every tie to spare and to respect; and yet, within a little month, he is found making himself merry, with his familiar friend, at the
expense of his unsuspecting host. But this, it may be said, is nothing more than a transient
sally of humour, or of spleen, bursting out in the unrestrained flow of confidential and
private correspondence. Well—on this point we are all liberality and acquiescence! Be it even
so. But what, then, shall we say of the violation of this privacy and confidence? What shall we
say of this exposure, which, while the widow is still surviving, holds up the deceased parent
to public derision? We do not ask the world to abide by the sentence of ancient and censorious
dotards like ourselves; but we appeal to every man, every woman, and every child, brought up
with the commonest feelings of delicacy and kindliness, whether they can contemplate this
disclosure without
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It will be some relief to introduce here, from the “Detached Thoughts” of Lord Byron, certain very diverting recollections of his acquaintance with the interior of a theatre—a dangerous episode in the life of a married man.
“When I belonged to the Drury Lane Committee, and was one of the Sub-Committee of Management, the number of plays upon the shelves were about five hundred. Conceiving that amongst these there must be some of merit, in person and by proxy I caused an investigation. I do not think that of those which I saw there was one which could be conscientiously tolerated. There never were such things as most of them! Mathurin was very kindly recommended to me by Walter Scott, to whom I had recourse, firstly, in the hope that he would do something for us himself, and secondly, in my despair, that he would point out to us any young (or old) writer of promise. Mathurin sent his Bertram and a letter without his address, so that at first I could give him no answer. When I at last hit upon his residence, I sent him a favourable answer and something more substantial. His play succeeded, but I was at that time absent from England.
“I tried Coleridge too, but he had nothing feasible in hand at the time. Mr. Sotheby obligingly offered all his tragedies, and I pledged myself, and notwithstanding many squabbles with my Committed Brethren, did get ‘Ivan’ accepted, read, and the parts distributed. But, lo! in the very heart of the matter, upon some tepidness on the part of Kean, or warmth on that of the author, Sotheby withdrew his play. Sir J. B. Burgess did also present four tragedies and a farce, and I moved Greenroom and Sub-Committee, but they would not.
“Then the scenes I had to go through!—the authors, and the authoresses, and the milliners, and the wild Irishmen—the people from Brighton, from Blackwall, from Chatham, from Cheltenham, from Dublin, from Dundee—who came in upon me! to all of whom it was proper to give a civil answer, and a hearing, and a reading. Mrs. * *’s father, an Irish dancing-master of sixty years, called upon me to request to play Archer, dressed in silk stockings, on a frosty morning, to show his legs (which were certainly good and Irish for his age, and had been still better)—Miss Emma Somebody, with a play entitled ‘The Bandit of Bohemia,’ or some such title or production—Mr. O’Higgins, then resident at Richmond, with an Irish tragedy, in which the unities could not fail to be observed, for the protagonist was chained by the leg to a pillar during the chief part of the performance. He was a wild man, of a savage appearance, and the difficulty of not laughing at him was only to be got over by reflecting upon the probable consequences of such cachinnation.
“As I am really a civil and polite person, and do hate giving pain when it can be avoided, I sent them up to Douglas Kinnaird—who is a man of business, and sufficiently ready with a negative—and left them to settle with him; and as the beginning of next year I went abroad, I have since been little aware of the progress of the theatres.
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“Players are said to be an impracticable people. They are so; but I managed to steer clear of any disputes with them, and excepting one debate with the elder Byrne about Miss Smith’s pas de—(something—I forget the technicals), I do not remember any litigation of my own. I used to protect Miss Smith because she was like Lady Jane Harley in the face, and likenesses go a great way with me. Indeed, in general, I left such things to my more bustling colleagues, who used to reprove me seriously for not being able to take such things in hand without buffooning with the histrions, or throwing things into confusion by treating light matters with levity.
“Then the Committee!—then the Sub-Committee!—we were but few, but never agreed. There was Peter Moore, who contradicted Kinnaird, and Kinnaird, who contradicted every body: then our two managers, Rae and Dibdin; and our secretary, Ward! and yet we were all very zealous and in earnest to do good and so forth. * * * furnished us with prologues to our revived old English plays, but was not pleased with me for complimenting him as ‘the Upton’ of our theatre, (Mr. Upton is, or was, the poet who writes the songs for Astley’s,) and almost gave up prologuing in consequence.”—Moore, vol. i. pp. 631—633.
We have neither the right nor the wish to dwell in any detail upon the
disastrous issue of Lord Byron’s matrimonial
experiment. The solution of the whole affair probably is, that his lady, after living a
twelvemonth with him, became strongly impressed with the belief that he was scarcely in a state
of mental sanity; and that, under the influence of this persuasion, she conceived herself
justified in consulting her own peace and safety; and that she accordingly effected her retreat
from him by what, when unexplained, might have the appearance of a sort of stratagem. There
probably was enough in his demeanour to produce an impression that his mind had lost its
equilibrium. He confesses, himself, that the confusion of his affairs, and the consequent
disorder of his health and distraction of his mind, frequently drove him into excess, and
disqualified his temper for comfort; and he further allows, that something is to be attributed
to his strange and desultory habits, brought on by his early release from discipline and
restraint. One eruption of his “perturbed spirit” is mentioned by Mr. Moore as having powerfully aided the suspicion that his
faculties were in a state of dislocation. In a fit of vexation and rage, brought on by some of
those humiliating embarrassments to which he was almost daily exposed, he took a favourite old
watch, which had been his companion from boyhood, and had gone with him to Greece, furiously
dashed it on the hearth, and ground it to pieces among the ashes with the poker! In this
paroxym of almost frantic violence might be discerned a strong symptom of alarming and habitual
excitement; and it may easily be imagined that a few
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“I can rely upon the accuracy of my memory for the following statement. I was originally consulted by Lady Noel on your behalf, whilst you were in the country; the circumstances detailed by her were such as justified a separation, but they were not of that aggravated description as to render such a measure indispensable. On Lady Noel’s representation, I deemed a reconciliation with Lord Byron practicable, and felt most sincerely a wish to aid in effecting it. There was not on Lady Noel’s part any exaggeration of the facts; nor so far as I could perceive, any determination to prevent a return to Lord Byron: certainly none was expressed when I spoke of a reconciliation. When you came to town in about a fortnight, or perhaps more, after my first interview with Lady Noel, I was for the first time informed by you of facts utterly unknown, as I have no doubt, to Sir Ralph and Lady Noel. On receiving this additional information, my opinion was entirely changed: I considered a reconciliation impossible. I declared my opinion, and added, that if such an idea should be entertained, I could not, either professionally or otherwise, take any part towards effecting it. Believe me, very faithfully yours,
We will give no utterance to the various surmises which irresistibly rush into
the mind on the perusal of this letter. Thus
| 292 | Life of Lord Byron. |
For ourselves, forbearing all further inquiry into the causes of Lady Byron’s separation from her husband, there is,
nevertheless, one question which we are irresistibly impelled to ask, though we fear it will be
thought most detestably illiberal; namely, what right had any man so deeply involved in
pecuniary difficulties to engage in matrimony at all? It appears, from Mr. Moore’s own statement, that “on Byron’s arrival in London, in December, 1814, he found
his affairs in so utterly embarrassed a condition as to fill him with some alarm, and even
to suggest to his mind the prudence of deferring his
marriage.” The prudence of deferring it! We should rather say,
the imperative and irresistible duty of deferring it—unless, indeed, the lady, on a full and
frank disclosure of circumstances, should generously choose to insist on an immediate
completion of the engagement. But, in our judgment, the peculiar turpitude of the transaction
lies much deeper than this. For our lives we cannot understand how a ruined man can dare to
propose an alliance with any woman on earth, whether an heiress or not, without first telling
her that he is a ruined man. Now it is evident from the tenor of the narrative before us, that
at the very time of his offering himself to Miss Milbanke, Lord
Byron must have distinctly known that this, or something very like this, was his
own condition. He knew that his affairs had long been falling into a state of almost desperate
confusion. We therefore ask, with all dutiful submission to more youthful and enlightened
minds, how it was that he, or any honourable man, could endure the thought of committing the
woman of his choice and attachment, even to the chance of all the misery and all the
humiliation incident to such a state of things? And when, at last, he fully learned the ruinous
extent of the evil, we should like to know the process by which he contrived to satisfy himself
that he was not behaving almost like a scoundrel, in going to the altar without making known to
the other parties the whole reality of his condition, and leaving to them the option of a
postponement or dissolution of the contract? The consequences of his rushing into new and heavy
responsibilities, with all this load of debt about his neck, is formidably, but very justly,
described by his devoted biographer. “His marriage (from the reputation, no doubt, of
the lady being an heiress) was, at once, a signal for all the arrears and claims of a long
accumulating state of embarrassment to explode upon him. His door was almost daily beset by
duns,
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“Nam vos Trojugenæ vobis ignoscitis; et
quæ
Turpia Cerdoni, Volesos Brutosque decebunt!” |
All the world knows the tempest which burst on the head of “the martyr” on his rupture with his wife. The winds of obloquy seemed to be let loose to fight against him from every corner of the heavens. In the first place there was the deep-mouthed indignation of wise and virtuous men. The cry, however, it may be allowed, was probably much aggravated by the yells of envious, malignant and despairing mediocrity, and by the vile yelpings of low ill-nature and reptile uncharitableness. But, however that may be, the clamour at last became utterly intolerable, and drove the illustrious delinquent from his ungrateful country, secretly exclaiming, perhaps, like Coriolanus to the Roman rabble,
“Ye common cry of curs—I banish you!” |
Mr. Moore has judged wisely in abstaining from any
further allusion to these particulars. Time and justice, he conceives, are doing more in favour
of Lord Byron’s character, than could be effected by
any gossiping details. We should apprehend, that, of the two, Time is by far the better friend
to his Lordship’s memory. “Who now asks,” says Mr.
Moore, “whether Dante
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| Life of Lord Byron. | 295 |
We are accustomed to hear a great deal of the cant of hypocrisy, and the cant of bigotry, and prejudice; but we think it may very safely be averred, that the cant and the pedantry of liberalism are, to say the least, quite as intolerable. If, however, there must be canting, we do not see why the men of liberality should, on this occasion, have it all to themselves. We shall accordingly produce a sample of that commodity, which we hope will be found at least as palatable as that which has been, so elaborately prepared for us by Thomas Moore.
|
“Strong links and mutual sympathies connect
The moral powers, and powers of intellect.
Still these on those depend by union fine,
Bloom as they bloom, and as they fade decline.
Talents, ’tis true, gay, quick, and bright, has God
To virtue oft denied, on vice bestowed:
Just as fond nature lovelier colours brings
To paint the insect’s than the eagle’s wings.
But, of our souls the high-born loftier part,
Th’ ethereal energies that touch the heart,
Conceptions ardent, labouring thought intense
Creative Fancy’s wild magnificence,
And all the dread sublimities of song,
These, Virtue, these to thee alone belong.
These are celestial all; nor kindred hold
With aught of sordid or debasing mould.
Chilled by the breath of Vice, their radiance dies,
And brightest burns when lighted at the skies.
Like vestal flames to purest bosoms given,
And kindled only by a ray from heaven.”*
|
And so much in answer to the raptures of Thomas Moore;
“Nay, an he’ll mouth, we’ll rant as well as
he;” |
* Mr. C. Grant.
|
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The second of Mr. Moore’s ponderous volumes is devoted to that portion of Lord Byron’s life which followed his separation from his wife. Its opening discovers this rejected husband “driven by the excommunicating voice of society to an exile which had not even the dignity of appearing voluntary.” He had often felt a sort of perverse gratification in representing himself as a being formed in a different mould from other men; as having the elements so strangely mixed in him, that he “could neither love the world, nor the world him.” He now found, with rankling mortification, that the world was abundantly ready to take him at his word; and he accordingly went forth from his country bristling all over with fierce resentment; resolved that, like a coiled hedgehog, he would present nothing but his prickles to the nostrils and the jaws of his persecutors. In this comfortable mood it was that he visited the plain of Waterloo, and climbed the “giant-snouted crags” of Switzerland; but he found that “the mountain-palaces of nature” could afford no asylum to a haunted heart;* and during this period it was that the perilous stuff which weighed upon his bosom vented itself in the third canto of Childe Harold, and the unearthly mystery of Manfred. For some time he lingered in the vicinity of Geneva, where he endured with wondrous tractability a good round scolding from the Staël, on the desperate absurdity of attempting to stand at bay against the opinion of the world. This searching exhortation did so far “unbend his noble courage,” that he actually signified to a friend in England his readiness still to be reconciled to his lady. The attempt failed. His words of peace were suffered to fall to the ground—(additional proof of her bitter sense of injury and outrage)—and they sprung up again, it would appear, in the
* Galt, p. 219.
|
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The life of his Lordship at Venice is matter of general notoriety. Every one
knows the ostentatious aversion which he there professed for the society of his countrymen. For
this feeling there might, perhaps, be some faint excuse. The sight,—nay, the very thought of an
Englishman, was sure to environ him with painful and humiliating reminiscences, from which he
might pardonably shrink. But then, there was something insufferably disgusting in the tone of
insolence with which he avowed his “utter abhorrence of the travelling
English,” and in the denunciations of their stupidity and coarseness which are
prodigally scattered over his correspondence. It is not, perhaps, quite so generally known that
in this “Sea-Sodom,”—as he himself entitles it,—he broke out into a course
of degrading profligacy which even he is said to have afterwards contemplated with loathing, if
not remorse. If this, however, was imperfectly known before, Mr.
Moore has taken most exemplary care that it shall be distinctly understood now.
He has assumed some credit fer the very laudable self-controul wherewith he has abstained from
all notice of the affairs of gallantry which solaced the leisure of his Lordship during
“the witching time” of his early popularity in England. He is, however,
extremely anxious that the world should duly
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* P. 51. |
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“They,” says he, “who would dare to plead the authority of Lord Byron for their errors, must first he able to trace them to the same palliating sources,—to that sensibility, whose very excesses showed its strength and depth,—that stretch of imagination, to the very verge, perhaps, of what reason can bear without giving way,—that whole combination, in short, of grand but disturbing powers, which alone could be allowed to extenuate such moral derangement, but which, even in him thus dangerously gifted, were insufficient to excuse it.”—p. 52.
We hold it impossible to be sufficiently grateful for the incomparable moral
safety lamp which our philosopher has here so skilfully and so considerately constructed for
us, and by which he has contrived to throw a sort of ingenious wire-gauze round the flame which
he exhibits, thus securing to us the benefit of light, without the danger of combustion! We do
trust that all grandmothers and maiden aunts will now toss to the winds their apprehensions,
lest the fire-damp of youthful fancies should burst into explosion from the contact of this
perilous and subtle element. The most nervous of moralists must perceive that the precautions
of our conductor have rendered such a crisis plainly impossible. Let all approach, then, and
contemplate, without scruple or alarm, the splendours of that “interesting chapter in
the history of the Poet’s heart and mind” which exhibits his intoxicating
successes, first with the vixen wife of a Venetian
shopkeeper, and then with a ferocious trull, the wife of
a baker, a virago of Amazonian strength and stature, who preserved her ascendency by knocking
her rivals down, and whom her illustrious lover himself could keep in order only by calling up
the keenest lightnings of his eye! It would, indeed, have been lamentable if this most didactic
exhibition should have been suppressed. Nothing can possibly be more authentic than the
materials for it. The details are furnished by the immortal genius himself. The whole history
of his bonnes fortunes is recorded by his own hand,
at prodigious length, and, evidently, with a lively relish of self-complacency and triumph: and
they are given, by his chronicler, almost with religious fidelity, always excepting an
occasional hiatus, excellently calculated to keep curiosity alive, and
imagination active. The
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These most delectable adventures were followed up by a somewhat more august specimen of adultery; we allude to his intimacy with the celebrated Countess Guiccioli. This young lady was married, or rather sold, at the age of sixteen, to a rich nobleman of Romagna, aged sixty. His Lordship’s unwearied liberality of communication has put us as completely in possession of this affair as it has of his Venetian recreations; and, besides, the Countess herself has been obliging enough to furnish Mr. Moore with a history of it, in the very purest Italian. “For some time,” he tells us, “she was an Angiolina, and he (the Count G.) a Marino Faliero, a good old man; but young Italian women are not satisfied with good old men:”—nor any other young women that we ever heard of. But then, other young women have not always the invaluable privilege enjoyed by those of Italy, namely, that of having husbands who, whether old or young, are a sort of trustees to shifting uses; retaining in themselves a legal estate and property in the persons of their wives, while the beneficial interest and usufruct seems to belong to the rest of the world. His Lordship’s residence at Ravenna was rendered exceedingly delightful, partly by the society of this lady, and partly by the opportunity it gave him of indulging his taste for turbulence and revolution. Italy, it will be remembered was, at that time, agitated by the plots of the Carbonari. Elements were abroad in wonderful harmony with the restless temperament of the bard. His time was accordingly pretty much divided between poetry, adultery, and insurrection. He entered deeply into the views and designs of the mal-contents, and assisted them largely by his counsels and his purse. And yet, after all, never, it must surely be confessed, since the world began, was there a much more ridiculous or miserable specimen of a conspirator! He knew perfectly well that all letters were opened by the government; and yet the following is the style in which he writes to England:
“Be assured there are troublous times brewing for Italy; and as I never could keep out of a row in my life, it will be my fate, I dare say, to be over head and ears in it. But no matter; these are the stronger reasons for coming to see me soon.”—Moore, p. 305.
“I have besides another reason for desiring you to be
speedy, which is,
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“I am in the third act of my tragedy; but whether it will be finished or not, I know not; I have, at this present, too many passions of my own on hand to do justice to those of the dead. Besides the vexations mentioned in my last, I have incurred a quarrel with the Pope’s carabiniers, or gens-d’armerie, who have petitioned the Cardinal against my liveries, as resembling too nearly their own lousy uniform. They particularly object to the epaulettes, which all the world with us have on upon gala days. My liveries are of the colours conforming to my arms, and have been the family hue since the year 1066.
“I have sent a tranchant reply, as you may suppose; and have given to understand that, if any soldados of that respectable corps insult my servants, I will do likewise by their gallant commanders; and I have directed my ragamuffins, six in number, who are tolerably savage, to defend themselves, in case of aggression; and, on holidays and gaudy days, I shall arm the whole set, including myself, in case of accidents or treachery. I used to play pretty well at the broad-sword, once upon a time at Angelo’s; but I should like the pistol, our national buccaneer weapon, better, though I am out of practice at present. However, I can ‘wink and hold out mine iron.’ It makes me think (the whole thing does) of Romeo and Juliet—‘now, Gregory, remember thy smashing blow.’”—p. 334.
“Politics here still savage and uncertain. However, we are all in our ‘bandaliers’ to join the ‘Highlanders if they cross the Forth,’ i. e. to crush the Austrians if they pass the Po. The rascals!—and that dog L——l, to say their subjects are happy!—If ever I come back, I’ll work some of these ministers.”—p. 347.
“I can’t say any thing to you about Italy, for the government here look upon me with a suspicious eye, as I am well informed. Pretty fellows!—as if I, a solitary stranger, could do any mischief. It is because I am fond of rifle and pistol shooting, I believe; for they took the alarm at the quantity of cartridges I consumed,—the wiseacres!”—p. 359.
“Of the state of things here it would be difficult and
not very pru-
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Now is it possible for mortal gravity to contemplate all this without being
tempted to invoke the spirit of Cervantes? What would that
mighty master have given for such a picture of a deep and subtle agitator? Here was a dealer in
plots and conspiracies, conscious that the ten thousand eyes and ears of a jealous despotism
were fixed upon him, and that not a syllable he penned could escape inspection,—and yet unable
to write to his friend or his publisher without some petty explosion of his noble impatience,
which might give due notice to the “scoundrels and barbarians,” of the sedition he was helping to brew within
their territories! With an enthusiasm so “stirring, audible, and full of
vent,” it would have been the consummation of folly to expect any thing else than
that which actually happened—namely, that his savour should be abhorred
by the government under which he was living, and that the land would speedily vomit him forth.
Had he been anxious to bring sentence of banishment, ruin, and proscription, on himself and his
friends, it would be hard to show how he could have laboured more effectually for the
accomplishment of that purpose. But this was one of the incorrigible puerilities of Byron’s character. He thought and talked about freedom like
a turbulent and contumacious schoolboy. He was always impatient to be acting over again the
mutinies of Harrow. The love of liberty never became a healthy principle in his constitution.
It was an element which fell into combination with his spleen, and his caprice, and his
eagerness for distinction; consequently, instead of diffusing a salutary glow throughout his
system and complexion, it was perpetually breaking out into foul and angry eruptions, which
betrayed the morbid fermentation going on within. All this while, be it remembered, he was a
fastidious patrician,—proud of his birth, and tenacious of his rank and privilege—an
aristocrat, not merely to the back bone, but to the very tips of his fingers. He had a positive
loathing for all that was plebeian; and was scarcely more proud of the might of his genius,
than he was of the smallness, and whiteness, and delicacy of his hands, which he regarded as
indications of the
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When driven from Ravenna his first migration was to Pisa: and thither the Guiccioli accompanied him, together with her father add brother, who were involved in the proscription, and who, according to the very comfortable “usages” of Italy, were
* “Lord Byron often
boasted of his being, at heart, devoutly aristocratical; and confessed that he had
completely inherited his mother’s disposition, who, according to him, was,
perhaps, the proudest woman in England.”—Millingen’s Memoirs on
Greece, p. 15, note. |
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“I have got,” he says, “into a famous old feudal palazzo, on the Arno, large enough for a garrison, with dungeons below, and cells in the walls, and so full of ghosts, that the learned Fletcher—(my valet)—begged leave to change his room, and then refused to occupy his new room, because there were more ghosts in that than in the other.”
From this place of perturbed spirits he was soon driven, not by the ghosts, but by powers of flesh and blood, which proved to be much more awkward customers. In consequence of a casual encounter with the guard at Pisa, he found it necessary to remove for a time to Monte Nero, a country house in the vicinity of Leghorn; and it was at this period that he formed his memorable coalition with Leigh Hunt. We have no room to dwell on this Holy Alliance. The whole affair is fresh in the recollection of the public; it is therefore only necessary to state that, from the representations of Mr. Moore, it appears clear that Lord Byron was the original author of the scheme. His motives were, “in the first place, his wish to second the views of his friend Shelley in inviting Hunt to join him in Italy; and, in the next, a desire to avail himself of Hunt’s experience, as an editor, in the favourite project of a periodical work.” He was in want, it seems, of some such vomitory, for discharging, without restraint, or obstruction, the villainous congestions of spleen, and ribaldry, of sedition and profaneness, that were now habitually forming in his mind. His temper had long been growing more and more intractable and wayward, more impatient of counsel and remonstrance, and more inflexibly resolved on outraging and defying the public opinion. This arrogant wilfulness is perpetually betraying itself in his correspondence, more especially that with his publisher Mr. John Murray, whom he was not always in the habit of treating with very ceremonious consideration. The following is a specimen.
“These (pecuniary) matters must be arranged with
Mr. Douglas Kinnaird. He is my trustee, and a
man of honour. To him you can state all your mercantile reasons, which you might not like
to state to me personally, such as, ‘heavy season’—‘flat
public’—‘don’t go off’—‘lordship writes too
much’—‘won’t take advice’—‘declining
popularity’—‘deduction for the trade’—‘make very
little’—‘generally lose by him’—‘pirated
edition’—‘foreign edition’—‘severe criticisms,’ &c.
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“You can also state them more freely to a third person, as between you and me they could only produce some smart postscripts, which would not adorn our mutual archives.
“I am sorry for the Queen, and that’s more than you are.”—Moore, vol. ii. p, 517.
Finding, therefore, that the explosions he prepared did not go off so freely and rapidly as he desired, under the management of his operatives in London, he was glad to set up, on the spot, a sort of infernal machine of his own, into which he might cram all the mephitic and combustible materials he could muster, and keep the match in his own hand. But the inexplicable part of the history is, that he should ever think of Leigh Hunt as a confederate in this high-minded enterprize,—Leigh Hunt,—the very man of whom he had formerly written in the following complimentary language to Mr. Moore!
* * * * * Hunt’s letter is probably the exact piece of vulgar coxcombry you might expect from his situation. He is a good man, with some poetical elements in his chaos; but spoilt by the Christ-Church Hospital and a Sunday newspaper,—to say nothing of the Surry Jail, which conceited him into a martyr. But he is a good man. When I saw ‘Rimini’ in MSS., I told him that I deemed it good poetry at bottom, disfigured only by a strange style. His answer was, that his style was a system, or upon system, or some such cant; and, when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless: so I said no more to him, and very little to any one else.
“He believes his trash of vulgar phrases tortured into
compound barbarisms to be old English; and we may say of it as Aimwell says of Captain Gibbet’s
regiment, when the captain calls it an ‘old corps,’—‘the oldest in
Europe, if I may judge by your uniform.’ He sent out his ‘Foliage’ by Percy Shelley * * *, and, of all the ineffable Centaurs that were ever
begotten by Self-love upon a Night-mare, I think this monstrous Sagittary the most
prodigious. He (Leigh H.) is an honest
Charlatan, who has persuaded himself into a belief of his own impostures, and talks Punch
in pure simplicity of heart, taking himself (as poor Fitzgerald said of himself in the Morning Post) for Vates in both senses,
or nonsenses, of the word. Did you look at the translations of his own which he prefers to
Pope and Cowper, and says so?—Did you read his skimble-skamble about * * being at
the head of his own profession, in the eyes
of those who followed it? I thought that Poetry was an art, or an attribute, and not a profession;—but be it one, is that * * * * * * at the head of your profession in your eyes? I’ll be
curst if he is of mine, or ever shall be. He is the only one of us
(but of us he is not) whose coronation I would oppose. Let them take Scott, Campbell,
Crabbe, or you, or me, or any of the living, and
throne him;—but not
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“But Leigh Hunt is a good man, and a good father—see his Odes to all the Masters Hunt;—a good husband—see his Sonnet to Mrs. Hunt;—a good friend—see his Epistles to different people;—and a great coxcomb, and a very vulgar person in every thing about him. But that’s not his fault, but of circumstances.”—Moore, pp. 176, 177.
The man,* be it observed, upon whom his lordship is here pouring out derision and contempt, was the martyr whom he had visited in prison; the worthy whom he had compared to Pym and Hampden; and, finally, the ally by whose aid he was to charge through the embattled columns of obsolete prejudice, and peradventure to bear down before him “the rotten privilege and custom” of all that was held venerable and sacred in the world. It should, however, in all fairness be mentioned that his own account of the project and the confederacy is somewhat different from that which is given by his biographer. In a letter to Mrs. Somebody, the date of which is not given, though he speaks more respectfully of the oracle of Cocaigne, he seems, by implication, to disclaim all hope of finding him a valuable and effective confederate, and represents himself as impelled to the scheme mainly by his anxiety to raise up the fallen fortunes of the literary adventurer, and political martyr.
“* * * * I presume that you, at least, know enough of me to be sure that I could have no intention to insult Hunt’s poverty. On the contrary, I honour him for it; for, I know what it is, having been as much embarrassed as ever he was, without perceiving ought in it to diminish an honourable man’s self-respect. If you mean to say that, had he been a wealthy man, I would have joined in this Journal, I answer in the negative. * * * I engaged in the Journal from good-will towards him, added to respect for his character, literary and personal; and no less for his political courage, as well as regret for his present circumstances: I did this in the hope that he might, with the same aid from literary friends of literary contributions (which is requisite for all Journals of a mixed nature), render himself independent.
|
* It is entirely alien from our office to enter into any discussion of
the conduct of Moore towards Leigh Hunt. We are nevertheless tempted to advert to certain letters addressed by Mr.
Moore to Mr. Hunt between the years 1810 and 1814, and
which have recently been made public by the latter; and in which it must have been the
intention of the writer, either most egregiously to mystify his correspondent, or else to
flatter him almost “beneath abhorring.” We take it for granted that these
letters are genuine: and, if so, there never, surely, was a much more flagrant instance,
either of deliberate mockery, or of crawling adulation. It must remain for the public to
pronounce what respect they think due to the moral or literary judgments of the man who
could pen such epistles, and yet stigmatize, as he does, a confederacy with his former
friend and correspondent, as an unworthy and degrading alliance. For ourselves, we must own
that there is, about all this, a savour of turpitude and treachery, whereat our nostrils
are in great indignation.
|
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“I have always treated him, in our personal intercourse, with such scrupulous delicacy, that I have forborne intruding advice, which I thought might be disagreeable, lest he should impute it to what is called ‘taking advantage of a man’s situation.’—Moore, p. 629.
We shall abstain from all attempt to unravel the mazes of this poor mystery:
——longa est injuria, longæ Ambages. |
Thus much, however, appears undeniable,—that the torrent of Byron’s genius, which was daily becoming more turbid and impetuous, lost itself, at length, in this dismal swamp.
It was during this glorious coalition, and while Hunt was established at the Lanfranchi Palace, that Mr. Shelley perished in a sailing excursion. His remains, and those of one of his companions named Williams, were cast ashore some time afterwards in a state unfit for removal. It was therefore determined to reduce them to ashes; and preparations were, accordingly, made for that purpose on the sea-shore, between the bay of Spezia and Leghorn.
“You can have no idea,” says his lordship, “what an extraordinary effect such a funeral pile has on a desolate shore, with mountains in the back ground, and the sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frankincense gave to the flame.”—Moore, vol. ii. p. 609.
Neither can we have any adequate idea of the scene that followed these classic obsequies. It is thus described by Mr. Galt.
“When the duty was done, and the ashes collected, they—(the mourners)—dined and drank much together, and bursting from the calm mastery with which they had repressed their feelings during the solemnity, gave way to frantic exultation. They were all drunk; they sang, they shouted, and their barouche was driven like a whirlwind through the forest.”
We know not whether the silence of Mr. Moore respecting this “dæmoniac revelry” is to be understood as indicative of any doubts respecting the fact, or whether it is to be ascribed to his considerate care for the reputation of his hero. Be that as it may, every one must agree with Mr. Galt, that, short of positive crime, no orgies can well be imagined more outrageously abominable.
The next migration of the exile was to Genoa. The encounter with the military
at Pisa, and a subsequent affray between the young Count
Gamba with a Swiss servant, had sickened the Tuscan government of its noble
visitants; and the whole party were thus compelled to seek for another city of refuge. After
some hesitation between Switzerland and Genoa, the latter was
| 308 | Life of Lord Byron. |
|
* Millingen’s Memoirs
on Greece, pp. 9, 10.
|
| Life of Lord Byron. | 309 |
The most robust constitution must have ultimately sunk under this frightful course of violence. But there was yet another cause of decay. He was making perpetual inroads on his stamina by the immoderate use of drastic medicine. The two evils which he dreaded worse than death were insanity and corpulence. His apprehensions of the first of these calamities were constantly plunging him into wretched meditation on the suicides which had occurred in his own family; and thus were rapidly destroying the healthful tone of his mind. His abomination of fatness, on the other hand, was incessantly tempting him to measure his wrists and waist, and to keep them within due compass by a course of discipline and diet which was equally fatal to the energies of his body. All these causes conspired to make him, during his later years, perhaps one of the most comfortless of hypochondriacs. Mr. Millingen affirms that he was often plunged into a condition bordering on despair. He had long ago surfeited on all the delights this world has to offer. He “had melted down his youth” in all the varieties of voluptuousness. His manhood had been drugged to intoxication by the new wine of popular applause. In spite of himself, his heart must perpetually have been echoing, with sepulchral hollowness, the words of the Preacher—“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” In short, the spirit of life was well nigh gone. What was to be done to work the vapid remainder into something like effervescence and agitation? If any thing could do this, it would be the breath that stirs in the regions of martial and political adventure. This he had already tried in Italy, and it probably afforded him some partial and transient relief. Whither was he to look now for a repetition of the excitement, become of late more than ever necessary to his very existence? At one time his thoughts had been directed towards the South American continent; at another time to Spain; but, at the present moment, Greece seemed to offer precisely the sphere of enterprise which his restless spirit was in need of. He accordingly provided himself with three splendid helmets, formed after the most approved classical model, and “out he went a colonelling” against his old friends the Osmanlis.
It is very curious to see the different aspects under which the same course of action will present itself to different minds.
“In the breeze that now bore him towards his beloved
Greece,” (chanteth Mr. Moore,)
“the voice of his youth seemed again to speak. Before the titles of hero, of
benefactor, to which he now aspired, that of poet, however pre-eminent, faded into nothing.
His love of freedom, his generosity, his thirst for the new and adventurous,—all were
re-awakened; and even the bodings that still lingered at the bottom of his heart but made
the course before him more precious from his consciousness of its
| 310 | Life of Lord Byron. |
“It was expected,” says the less courtly Mr. Galt, “when he sailed for Greece, (nor was the expectation unreasonable with those who believe imagination and passion to be of the same element,) that the enthusiasm which flamed so highly in his verse was the spirit of action, and would prompt him to undertake some great enterprise. But he was only an artist; he could describe bold adventures and represent high feeling, as other gifted individuals give eloquence to canvass and activity to marble; but he did not possess the wisdom necessary for the instruction of councils. I do, therefore, venture to say, that in embarking for Greece, he was not entirely influenced by such exoterical motives as the love of glory or the aspirations of heroism. His laurels had for some time ceased to flourish; the sear and yellow, the mildew and decay, had fallen upon them, and he was aware that the bright round of his fame was ovalling from the full, and showing the dim rough edge of waning.”—Galt, p. 274.
Now let us hear his Lordship’s own account of the matter to Mr. Millingen.
“Heartily weary of the monotonous life I had led in Italy for several years; sickened with pleasure; more tired of scribbling than the public, perhaps, is of reading my lucubrations;—I felt the urgent necessity of giving a completely new direction to the course of my ideas; and the active, dangerous, yet glorious scenes of the military career struck my fancy, and became congenial to my taste. After all, should this new mode of existence fail to afford me the satisfaction I anticipate, it will, at least, present me with the means of making a dashing exit from the scene of this world, where the part I was acting had grown excessively dull.”—Millingen, p. 6, 7.
In August, 1823, he accordingly embarked for Cephalonia, where he lingered for
a considerable time, waiting, apparently, until the dissensions of the Greeks should subside
into unanimity. He might almost as reasonably have waited until the ruins of the Parthenon
should re-arrange themselves into their original symmetry and grandeur. It was during his stay
in this island that his life was varied by the curious episode of a series of religious conferences with Dr. Kennedy. It is impossible to regard the efforts of this
very worthy and amiable man for the conversion of Lord Byron
without sentiments of profound respect and esteem; but it is also quite impossible for us to be
blind to the unwelcome truth that he was utterly inadequate to an encounter with the daring,
reckless, and irreverent spirit of his catechumen. We greatly fear that, under the show of
candour and of patience, the pupil was only mystifying his venerable and simple-hearted
instructor. He professed that he, truly, was no enemy to Christianity; that he did not wish to
pass his days in unbelief; that he only desired
| Life of Lord Byron. | 311 |
But to return from the moral regeneration of Lord
Byron to the political regeneration of Greece—two attempts, to all human
appearance, of about equal promise: when the Liberator arrived at Missolonghi, he found himself
in the midst of disturbed and mutinous elements, which a poet might, perhaps, delight to
picture, but which no poet except himself could ever have dreamed of controlling. “The
whole population,” says Mr. Moore,
“presented such a fermenting mass of insubordination and discord as was far more
likely to produce warfare among themselves than with the enemy.” And the person
on whom every eye was fixed as the Grand Pacificator and Deliverer was—what?—a man bred in
camps, or in cabinets? one practised in military adventure, or regularly trained in the
business of political agitation, or graduated in the arduous craft of moulding the conflicting
passions, tempers, and interests of men to his own purposes? No-
| 312 | Life of Lord Byron. |
We are miserable judges of military or revolutionary operations, and shall,
therefore, abstain from all attempt to detail or to criticise the measures pursued by the
leaders of the insurrection. We shall, accordingly, content ourselves with stating that the
expedition to Lepanto was abandoned, in consequence of the mutiny and dismissal of the
Suliotes, who constituted a chief part of the force intended for that enterprize, and that
Byron did not live to witness any other effort. There
was one scheme, however, entertained by him, so extravagantly wild, that we are almost disposed
to regard it, with Mr. Galt, as an indication that his
“part in the world was nearly done,” and “that his mind was
passing
| Life of Lord Byron. | 313 |
| 314 | Life of Lord Byron. |
Thus terminated the career of a man who, beyond all controversy, has made magnificent contributions towards the mere intellectual wealth and grandeur of his country. And yet, in spite of our admiration for all this mental power, we can scarcely give utterance to the painful emotions with which we rise from the contemplation of the whole work before us. On the one hand we have the life, and the deeds, and the correspondence, and the journalizing soliloquies, of one who may really be said to have deified his own ungovernable passions; and on the other, we have the melliti verborum globuli administered, even to loathing, by his devoted and almost slavish apologist: and we actually despair of conveying to our readers any conception of the effect produced by this alternation of flavours, otherwise than by requesting them to imagine what would be the operation upon their own palates of a succession of biscuits, hotly and most diabolically peppered, and varied at intervals by a course of unsubstantial and sugared confectionry. We potently believe that the poet himself, if he could now taste the preparation, would turn away from its “luscious vices,” after the first yearnings of self-complacency were over. Honey, we believe, has sometimes been em-
* Millingen, p.
143. |
| Life of Lord Byron. | 315 |
We have already adverted to the artifices which have been so prodigally
resorted to by Mr. Moore, in order to turn the edge of
the public indignation, so long and so relentlessly directed against the character of his hero.
We have seen that all his worst aberrations from right have here been generously ascribed to
the influence of disturbing forces beyond his controul, or to certain peculiarities inherent in
his temper and constitution. His disdainful estimate of mankind is attributed to a noble and
innate detestation of hypocrisy; his outrageous defiance of public opinion, to the ungenerous
persecution which drove him to desperation, and called up from the depths of his nature a
principle of reckless and savage resistance; his range of licence and profligacy to that
desolation of heart which came over him, together with the ruin of his domestic prospects, and
the “shivering of his household gods”; his habitual scorn for sacred things,
to his abhorrence of bigotry and priestcraft, and to his disgust at the unblushing effrontery
with which the practice of men too frequently gives the lie to their professions; his distaste
for all the decencies and sanctities of life, to the fastidious impatience of a towering and
transcendent intellect. These are the topics which, with “most damnable
iteration,” are perpetually paraded before us throughout this blessed
“labour of love”! We hear of nothing but lacerated sensibilities, and
withered hopes—of volcanic fires which ravage while they illuminate—and of self-tormenting
energies which consume and tear the energumen, while they astonish the world with feats of
superhuman strength. In the midst of the “wanton heed and giddy cunning” of
this melodious maze of sophistry, a correct and attentive ear may always discern one
| 316 | Life of Lord Byron. |
The correspondence printed in the second volume is described by Mr. Moore as a “costly treasure, equal, if not
superior, in vigour, variety, and liveliness, to any that have yet adorned this branch of
our literature.” These are large words, which the writer of them does not,
perhaps, expect to have very accurately measured. They will be found, however, on examination,
not to be very much too big for the truth. There is, undoubtedly, in these letters a prodigal
exhibition of various talent—a masterly freedom of hand—a wonderful command of the English
language—a matchless versatility—and extraordinary powers of entertainment. With the exception
of a very large amount of unimportant and worthless scraps—(which, however, swell the volume
and its price)—the collection is evidently the produce of a most original and capacious mind:
and yet the perusal of them leaves behind an impression, on the whole, decidedly revolting. The
letters are full of a dashing, reckless, desperate vivacity, which sometimes degenerates into
flippancy, and sometimes swells into insolence and swagger. They perpetually remind us of the
Corsair; “there is a laughing
devil in their sneer.” They are, moreover, frequently broken by those ominous
lacunæ, which we have already remarked in the previous portions of his lordship’s
correspondence, and which give very intelligible notice that much has been omitted of which
this canting, fastidious, hypocritical world is not worthy. Enough, however, is preserved to
exhibit the meteorology of a mind wayward, capricious, and unmanageable
as the elements. His friends, it appears, sometimes attempted to lash these winds, and to chain
these waters. But they all found that
| Life of Lord Byron. | 317 |
“They might as well go stand upon the beach, And bid the main flood bate his usual height,” |
“Kill the physician, and the fee bestow Upon the foul disease.” |
“As to the cant of the day,” he added, “I despise it, as I do all its other finical fashions, which become you as paint became the ancient Britons.”—“If they had told me that the poetry (of Don Juan) was bad, I would have acquiesced; but they say the contrary, and then talk to me about morality—the first time I ever heard the word from any body that was not a rascal that used it for a purpose. I maintain it is the most moral of poems; but if people won’t discover the moral, that is their fault, and not mine.”
Again—
“You talk of refinement: are you at all more moral? are you so moral? No such thing. I know what the world is in England, by my own proper experience of the best of it—at least, of the loftiest; and I have described it every where as it is found in all places.”
It was this sort of refinement and prudery, he affirmed,
which had banished the comedies of Congreve; and which,
if tolerated, must cut away half of Ariosto, La Fontaine, Shakspeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger,
Ford, and all the Charles
II. writers; in short, something of most who have written before Pope, and are worth reading, and much of
Pope himself. When Dryden was
censured by Collier for the laxity of his writings, he
said with calmness and candour, “I plead guilty to all thoughts and expressions of
mine that can be truly accused of obscenity, immorality and profaneness, and retract them.
If he be my enemy, let him triumph; if he be my friend, he will be glad of my
repentance.” Not so Lord Byron. He roundly
appeals to the good old days when profaneness and indecency were fashionable; protests against
the degenerate delicacy of the present age; and insists on restoring to literature its ancient
privilege of license and depravity. His friends would frequently represent to him the dangerous
influence of his writings upon the religious principles of the public; but he replied only by
asking, who was ever altered by a poem? Besides, “he could not understand why he was
accused of irreligion; he was no enemy to religion—he thought that people could never have
enough, if they had any; he was a
| 318 | Life of Lord Byron. |
There is one extract from his papers which we are satisfied will be perused with the bitterest disgust by every one who has not prostituted his better judgment to a slavish idolatry for mere intellectual power. In December, 1820, he saw the following paragraph in a newspaper:—“Lady Byron is, this year, the Lady Patroness at the Annual Charity Ball given at the Town Hall at Hinckley, Leicestershire, and Sir George Crew, Baronet, the principal Steward.” The occasion which this occurrence offered of venting his vindictive spleen against his wife was too tempting to be resisted. He accordingly solaced himself by the composition of a copy of verses, full, as Mr. Moore tells us, of strong and indignant feeling, every stanza concluding with the words “Charity Ball;” and the train-thought that predominates through the whole may be collected from the two opening stanzas.
|
“What matter the pangs of a husband and father,
If his sorrows in exile be great or be small,
So the Pharisee’s glories around her she gather,
And the Saint patronizes her ‘Charity Ball.’
|
|
“What matters—a heart, which though faulty was feeling,
Be driven to excesses which once could appal—
That the Sinner should suffer is only fair dealing,
As the Saint keeps her charity back for ‘the Ball.’”
Vol. ii. p. 540.
|
Now the first question which will occur to any reasonable man, on perusing
these venomous lines, is this. Is it to be concluded that every woman who is separated from her
husband, for no guilt of her own, is bound to alienate herself from all open participation
| Life of Lord Byron. | 319 |
But we are weary of our task, and must bring it to a close. We have little to
add, except that, in the estimate of every unperverted mind, the character of Byron must now be a settled point. The events of his life,
combined with the extracts from his log-book and correspondence, have
done his memory this good office. After squeezing out from the mass of these volumes the
cloying
| 320 | Life of Lord Byron. |
———“Such resting found the sole Of unblest feet!” |
“Lust, though to a radiant angel linked, Can sate itself in a celestial bed, And prey on garbage.” |
Some powerfully redeeming properties he certainly appears to have possessed. He was accessible to frequent visitations of the spirit of gentleness; and there is something in the depth of his attachment to his sister, Mrs. Leigh, and in his breathings of affection towards his daughter, which it is quite a relief to contemplate. He had, it would appear, in an extraordinary degree, the power of engaging the fidelity and good will of his attendants, whom he seems to have treated with uniform kindness and indulgence. For friendship, he professed, like Napoleon, not to have any genius; and of the permanence of all such intimacies he held distance and infrequency of intercourse to be the only true secrets. He was in a remarkable degree compassionate and humane; and liberal, sometimes even to munificence. It must nevertheless be stated, that generosity seems to have had much more of his respect than justice. At Ravenna, for instance, his charities were such, that the poor of the place petitioned against his removal; and yet, all this while he had debts at home for
* Moore,
vol. ii. p. 423. |
| Life of Lord Byron. | 321 |
“They soon perceived,” says Mr. Millingen, “that he was not a theoretical, but a practical friend to their country; and the repeated acts of kindness and charity which he performed, in relief of the poor and distressed, and the heavy expenses which he daily incurred for the furtherance of every plan and institution which he thought might advance the general good, showed them that he was not less alive to their private than he was to their public interests.”—p. 102.
The vagueness and indistinctness of his notions on the subjects of politics and religion is almost pitiable. In politics, agitation seems to have been his favourite principle; no matter what was the cause, provided it were sufficiently turbulent and revolutionary. He had, at one time, a prodigious longing to come over and join the Luddites; and it is not at all clear to us, that, if he were living at this moment, he would not be in Ireland, by the side of that mighty hunter Daniel O’Connell, ready to cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of civil war. It is, indeed, just possible that he may have contrived to persuade himself, that, in yielding to these capricious impulses, he did but obey the promptings of a generous spirit, at mortal enmity with tyranny and persecution; while, in reality, he was only indulging his passion for a row, which, by his own confession, always ruled him with an irresistible charm. That he had little of consistent and enlightened zeal for the cause of freedom is evident from the insane violence of his wrath at the final overthrow of Napoleon; the permanence of whose dynasty must have reduced the future liberties of Europe to a worthless and shadowy reversion. Of his speculations on religion, (if they can deserve so respectable a name,) it would be almost absurd to speak. To the very last he seemed to be blown about with every wind of opinion.
“To say the truth,” he confessed, “I find it equally difficult to know what to believe in this world, and what not to believe. There are as many plausible reasons for inducing me to die a bigot, as there have been to make me hitherto live a free-thinker.”—Millingen, p. 129.
It is pretty clear that he never attentively studied the evidences of our
faith; and it may reasonably be doubted whether he had patience for that or any other painful
course of investigation.
| 322 | Life of Lord Byron. |
That he had in his nature some prime rudiments of greatness it would be absurd
to question. There is, however, one indication of genuine grandeur of which he was wholly
destitute: he was without that serenity and simplicity which are the surest marks of a
commanding spirit. He never exhibited that repose which is among the most awful and sublime
symptoms of conscious strength. His mind was in a perpetual state of fermentation and unrest;
and, though it may appear a hard and bitter saying, we have very little doubt that a tremendous
intensity of selfishness was the principle which occasioned this incessant and boiling
commotion. In souls of the very highest order there is little of this “double, double,
toil and trouble.” There is nothing in them which reminds us of the cauldron of
sorcery, with its vile ingredients and its infernal “gruel.” The might of
the ocean depths, in their stern and calm magnificence, is the proper image of such supreme
intelligences. There was that in the temper of
| Life of Lord Byron. | 323 |
Our words are well nigh ended; and, for aught we can tell, there may be numbers who will be ready to exclaim, that they are just such words as might be expected from “scoundrel priests,” or abusive and virulent old wives. Why, it will be asked, this ungenerous and uncharitable blazon of the failings and transgressions of a mighty spirit? Why this ruthless dragging forth of the vices of a great mind from the “dread abode” of the sepulchre? To all who may put this question to us, we shall only reply, by telling them to ask it of his biographer. We could have been well content to admire all that was truly admirable in his writings—to avert our eyes, as much as might be, from all that was odious and pernicious there—to gaze on the dazzling miracles of his genius—and to banish from our thoughts the black and fetid smoke out of which they too often issued forth. We could have been well content to look upward at the blazing glories of the volcano, without a wish to explore the secrets of its foul and sulphurous entrails. We could have been content, in short, to think only of the poet, and to forget the man. But his friend and chronicler was not content to have it so. It is he who has chosen to rake and stir from its depths this noisome Camarina; and since it has been his pleasure so to do, it is the duty of all who tender the public health, to counteract and neutralize its steaming pestilence with the most pungent and drastic fumigations which their moral alchemy can possibly supply. “Peace”* was the only wish which Byron desired to have inscribed upon his tomb; and this wish is denied him by his officious and fanatical admirers. And if they will break his repose,—if they will disquiet him, to bring him up,—they must not look to have him greeted as “a spirit of health,” at least by those who desire to be, themselves, visited by “airs from heaven.” The name of Byron, it is quite notorious, has done more to couple the glories of intellectual might with the abominations of licentiousness and infidelity, than almost any other name that can be produced from the whole range of our literature; and thousands, and tens of thousands have probably sunk, and still are sinking, under the influences of that most disastrous conjunction. And yet, it seems, we have astrologers, and Chaldeans, and wise men among us, who loudly invite us to look upon these portentous splendours, as if they betokened little else than peace and joy. What, then, have we to do, but to call back the minds of men from this treacherous wisdom, and to fix them
* “Implora
pace” were the words of an epitaph which forcibly struck him in
Italy; and he expressed a wish that the same might be adopted for himself. |
| 324 | Life of Lord Byron. |
Of the poetry of Byron we shall forbear to speak. The resources of criticism have already been exhausted upon it. It has exercised the wit of men, and women, and striplings. One thing only we must remark: he has been deliberately pronounced by Mr. Moore worthy to be placed by the side of Shakspeare and of Milton. Now this is a judgment which neither Gods, nor Men, nor Columns will endure for a moment. Shakspeare, without stirring from his native land, or emerging from a very narrow sphere of life, has, actually, “sounded all the depths and shoals” of human passion. He has spoken, too, in the language of every rank and gradation of society, from the sovereign to the artificer and peasant, just as if he had been intimately conversant with every class and variety of men; or rather, as if he had been gifted with the power of summoning their spirits, at will, to inhabit his own bosom: and, having exhausted this world, he “then imagined new.” All this implies a faculty of intuition which closely approximates to that of a supernatural intelligence, and places its possessor first among the children of men. And, then, if any one desires to see intellectual comparison rendered striking, even to awfulness, by depth of moral contrast, let him look upon Milton, in the midst of neglect, and poverty, and blindness, giving utterance to words which are fitted to delight the ear of men and angels, and which it would be the burning disgrace of posterity ever to “let die;” and then let them think of the sickening, jaded, and shattered sensualist, in the Capreas of his Italian exile—rebel to God and slanderer of God’s creatures—infesting the world with the outpourings of blasphemy and vice, and courting immortal infamy in the cantos of Don Juan.